I was a boy in Sharon,
Pennsylvania, I looked in a pool in the brook and discovered a lot of
fish. I broke some branches off a tree, and with this I brushed the fish
out of the pool. I sold them to a teamster for ten cents. With this I
bought shoe blacking and a shoe brush and spent my Saturdays blacking
boots for travelers at the depot and the hotel. I had established a
boot-blacking business which I pushed in my spare time for several
years. My brush and blacking represented my capital. The shining of the
travelers' shoes was labor. I was a capitalist but not an employer; I
was a laborer but not an employee.

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital," said Lincoln. This is
true. I labored to break the branches from the tree before I had any
capital. They brought me fish, which were capital because I traded them
for shoe blacking with which I earned enough money to buy ten times more
fish than I had caught.

So labor is prior to capital--when you use the words in their right
meaning. But call the employee "labor" and the employer "capital,"
and you make old Honest Abe say that the employee is prior to and
independent of the employer, or that the wage earner is independent of
the wage payer or, in still shorter words, the man is on the job before
the job is created. Which is nonsense.

Capital does not always mean employer. A Liberty Bond is capital but it
is not an employer; the Government is an employer but it is not capital,
and when any one is arguing a case for an employee against his
employer let him use the proper terms. The misuse of words can cause a
miscarriage of justice as the misuse of railway signals can send a train
into the ditch.

All my life I have been changing big words into little words so that the
employee can know what the employer is saying to him. The working man
handles things. The professional man plies words. I learned things
first and words afterward. Things can enrich a nation, and words can
impoverish it. The words of theorists have cost this nation billions
which must be paid for in things.

When I was planning a great school for the education of orphans, some of
my associates said: "Let us teach them to be pedagogues." I said:
"No, let us teach them the trades. A boy with a trade can do things. A
theorist can say things. Things done with the hands are wealth, things
said with the mouth are words. When the housing shortage is over and we
find the nation suffering from a shorta